Jeff Jacoby writes a powerful column today about Doctor Oscar Elias Biscet, a Cuban physician who is imprisoned in Cuba for daring to speak against the Castro regime. Doctor Biscet will be honored, in absentia, with the highest civilian honor of the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His day-to-day routine will not vary, though. He will still be in that broom closet-sized Cuban prison cell.
Peter Kirsanow, a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, has written that the conditions of Biscet's incarceration are like something out of Victor Hugo: "windowless and suffocating, with wretched sanitary conditions. The stench seeping from the pit in the ground that serves as a toilet is intensified by being compressed into an unventilated cell only as wide as a broom closet. . . . Biscet reportedly suffers from osteoarthritis, ulcers, and hypertension. His teeth, those that haven't fallen out, are rotted and infected."
A prolife Christian physician, Biscet first ran afoul of the Castro regime in the 1990s, when he investigated Cuban abortion techniques – Cuba has by far the highest abortion rates in the Western Hemisphere – and revealed that numerous infants had been killed after being delivered alive. In 1997, he began the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, which seeks "to establish in Cuba a state based on the rule of law" and "sustained upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." In 1999, he was given a three-year sentence for "disrespecting patriotic symbols." To protest the regime's repression, he had hung a Cuban flag upside down.
For decades, various American journalists and celebrities have rhapsodized about Castro's supposed island paradise, resolutely ignoring the mountains of evidence that it is in reality a tropical dungeon. Intent on seeing Castro as a revolutionary hero and Cuba as Shangri-la, they avert their gaze from the island's genuine heroes – the prisoners of conscience like Biscet, who pay a fearful price for their insistence on telling the truth.
Yes, the left in America performs interpretive dances to celebrate Fidel Castro. They studiously ignore any Cuban political prisoners. They imagine the suppression that they live under, while appearing on nationwide television to decry their being "silenced". They do not have a clue as to what real silencing is about:
"A screaming mass of soldiers swarming over the circular, stabbing with bayonets, crushing limbs with truncheons and rubber-wrapped chains. The panic of no place to hide, knowing you'll be beaten harder for trying to protect yourself, stomped on for clinging to a pillar or rail, thrown down the stairs for daring to hesitate. . . . The indignity of men whining, begging, whimpering before a skull is cracked, a shoulder yanked from its socket, genitals smashed with the gun butt."
For the families of political prisoners, the cruelties come in other forms, such as the humiliating strip-searches on the rare occasions when a prison visit is permitted. And there is economic privation: Oscar Biscet's wife, Elsa Morejon, is a trained nurse, but she has been barred from holding a professional job in Cuba since 1998.
Michael Moore and his fellow travelers sing the praises of the Cuban medical system, ignoring the realities of what that system is like for the people who actually have to use it. Maybe they should ask Doctor Biscet what he thinks of it.
